EU - what's next?

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The setbacks for centrist parties in the European elections showed that the EU’s crisis is anything but over. Yet the Left’s lack of strategy and identity has hobbled its ability to provide an alternative.
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These are, then, times of rapidly shifting political allegiances. But when should the Left expect to make electoral progress among European workers and reformist sections of the middle class, if not now? There is an urgent need to explain the Left’s disastrous failure to do this. Four reasons come to mind — certainly, there are more.


Strategy

The first and most basic reason is the seemingly total absence of a realistic anti-capitalist, or at least anti-neoliberal, left-wing political strategy related to the European Union. There is not even a debate on the crucial issue of whether the EU can at all be a vehicle for anti-capitalist politics. Instead, there is a naïve or opportunistic acceptance — and it’s hard to say which is worse — of the feel-good “Europeanism” so popular among young people and so useful for both Green electioneering and European technocrats seeking legitimacy for their neoliberal regime.
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In particular, any critical discussion of the EU’s central social policy — the free movement of labor between the now economically extremely different member countries — is strictly avoided, combined with hints of sympathy for open borders generally, including those with the outside world. This does nothing but validate the image spread by the Greens and the center-left middle-class parties of Europe being mainly about young people traveling without border controls and not needing to change money.


Europeanism

Second, in most if not all countries, the Left found it irresistible to join the old and new center parties — Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, the Greens — in declaring the new nationalist right an imminent threat to democracy, which made voting “for Europe,” or even for “more Europe” the necessary defensive position. In fact, often enough, the Left raised the stakes by suggesting that the new right was in fact a very old right, and not voting for it was a contemporary version of the anti-fascist struggle of the interwar years.
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Exaggerating the threat from the new right was certain to drive voters into the arms of liberal establishment parties who promised “stability” in hard times. If fascism was something to be defeated by voting for “more Europe,” there was no need to go as far as vote for the radical left; voting for the new darlings of the middle class would suffice. If democracy means parliaments without neo-nationalist “populists,” voting every five years for a “non-populist” party will do.


Climate

Third, the radical left had no idea how to handle the issue of climate change, whose prominence in recent months again played into the hands of the Greens. In this, the Left did not differ at all from the established center parties. It is easy to understand why it stumbled on this question.

Calls for higher taxes on gasoline or less consumption of cheap meat, or meat in general, are easier to live with, and sometimes to heed, for the middle class than for the lower and working class. Appeals to individual virtue may awaken the bad conscience of the environmentally woke but fail to reach those who feel a need to catch up in consumption with their betters.

Rather than chiming in when the Greens and their bourgeois elders sing their siren songs, what should matter from the Left’s point of view is that voluntary changes in lifestyles are vastly inadequate to stopping global warming or the long ongoing decline of biodiversity.

A Left that limits itself to reciting the Greens’ scare stories about an impending end to life on the planet drives many of its potential voters into denial, and from there into the arms of the New Right.


Faux Federalism

Fourth and finally, although the writing had long been on the wall, the Left has badly underestimated what early socialists called the “national question” and its importance for its core constituency.

For working people, “Europe” is a far-away technocracy, a world outside of their life experience. This is not much different from the middle class. The latter, however, has learned, and prefers, to pretend that it knows who is doing what in Brussels, which in fact nobody outside of a narrow circle of specialists really does know.

The Left, like the Greens, tend to relegate political issues to a European level of democratic politics that doesn’t exist outside parties’ imagination and indeed won’t exist for any foreseeable future. “Europe,” and the European Parliament in particular, is a depository of pious hopes. This will, however, last only until it is finally discovered that the Europeanists have overplayed their hand and, busy with trying to re-educate their voters in the cosmopolitan spirit, forgotten the political toolkit that was waiting for them at the national level. Consider the German case, where the Die Linke majority forced Aufstehen leader Sahra Wagenknecht to resign from her post as parliamentary speaker.

A radical left in its right mind could contribute importantly to “Europe.” It would, however, have to take leave of the superficial “pro-Europeanism” of the old and new center parties. It would have to insist that “European solutions” cannot replace national-level action, if only because they tend to be unavailable or will come too late. It would also have to defend really existing democracy, i.e., nation-state democracy, against its “cosmopolitan” replacement with castle-in-the-sky supranational democracy.

This would mean pointing out that democracy begins at the bottom. That reconciliation with nature and among people does not fall from the sky of “Europe” and is not to be had for nothing. Shortly after their election, the members of the European Parliament will have become 751 like-minded lobbyists for supranational technocracy, dressed up as democratic representatives of a European people that does not yet exist. Social change for the better will not come from above, from them.


https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/european-parliament-elections-results-left

KinderLad wrote:Zeleni su spas u zadnji čas

Western Balkans policy



In 1999, Fischer supported German military participation in the Kosovo War. This proved to be a highly controversial position since Fischer's plan not only clashed with the largely pacifist philosophy of The Greens, but because it also supported for the first time since World War II active participation of German soldiers in combat. Fischer justified this military involvement with allegations that Serbia was planning to commit genocide against the Kosovo Albanians.

Fischer represented the German government at the funeral services for Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić of Serbia on 16 March 2003 (alongside Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul)[18] and President Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia on 5 March 2004 in Skopje.

In mid-April 1999, Germany came up with the first peace plan, when Fischer produced a proposal, notably including Russia, that would have rewarded the beginning of a Yugoslav pullout from Kosovo with a bombing pause.[9] In May 1999, however, an antiwar protester flung a bag of red paint at Fischer during a party convention debating NATO’s airstrikes on Yugoslavia in the war over Kosovo; Fischer suffered a perforated eardrum.

https://twitter.com/DPC_global/status/1136637698851127297


Democratization Policy Council
‏ @DPC_global

It’s confirmed: EU decision on #Albania, #northmacedonia kicked down the road to September summit, in violation of 6/18 Council compromise, due to @cducsubt blockade, result of perfect Paris-Berlin mess

1. @EU_Commission gave in to Macron pressure, moved agreed April publication date of country reports to end of May, until after @Europarl_EN elections 2/8

2. In Berlin, Bundestag @cducsubt , hostile to Albania, declared not having enough time to review reports for this week’s parliamentary session, last session before June 20-21 EU summit

3. @spdbt , suorted by @DieGruenen and FPD, insisted on 6/19 unconditional opening of accession negotiations with both countries, left no space for compromise, i.e., decoupling of #northmacedonia and #Albania as demanded by Skopje, thus

* Neither #northmacedonia nor #Albania will get decision this month as promised 6/18 by EU leaders, again weakening the EU’ reform conditionality

* #northmacedonia decision risks being blocked in September by next Nia Demokratia-led Greek government following snap elections in July – dealing a death blow to Prespa agreement, democratization in Mk & the credibility of enlargement, thus

KinderLad wrote:

Uopste nije pitanje national vs "cosmopolitan", nego national vs european. To su dve razlicite stvari. 

KinderLad wrote:
Pa ok, ali on se bori sa tek nepostojecim. Evropa, bilo kao EU, bilo kao kontinent, bilo kao civilizacija, ima neke granice, diskutabilne ili ne, ali postoje. Tamo gde dolazi do sukoba pro et contra EU, pristalice EU jasno masu simbolima postojece politicke organizacije. Problem postoji - on se pre svega tice odgovora na Orbana (posto je on "najsavremeniji" na desnici u tom smislu), ali ne postoji borba sa "kosmopolitizmom". To mozda moze za Ameriku, Evropa se zna sta je. A ne mozes da imas zajednicku "etnicku" odrednicu za nesto sto nije "etnija". Ali mozes zajednicku politicku, pa u tom smislu "ur-nacionalnu". Mislim, EU mozda ima alternativu, ali Evropa apsolutno nema alternativu.